Category: 2024-2025

Pressured Speech.

Content warning: This article is primarily about mental illnesses and one specific effect they can have on language use.
Cryptophasia: the secret language of twins

Cryptophasia – a phenomenon that mostly occurs in twins – derives from Greek, with ‘crypto’ meaning secret, and ‘phasia’ meaning speech. As the name suggests, it is a language developed by twins that only the two children can understand.
The Gender Code: Dangerous Gender Marking?

From pronouns to professions, gender codes are all around us. Though often unnoticed, they shape society as it exists today.
A Night Counting Stars: What Yoon Dongju, the Ill-fated Korean Poet Wished upon a Star

A Night Counting Stars – 별 헤는 밤, a poem by Yoon DongJu – 윤동주, translated by Chaewon Kim
To All the Names I’ve Loved Before: the Romance of Surnames as Nicknames

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and for me, it’ll probably be spent curled up with a blanket, rewatching my favourite romcoms. Recently, I binged season 2 of XO, Kitty, and one detail stuck with me: one of the love interests calls the protagonist, Kitty, by her last name, ‘Covey’. At first, it seems…
Low Literacy, High Office: How Trump proves that you don’t need to read to succeed

In 2020, Donald Trump proclaimed via Twitter (or X) that he was not “just smart, but genius. And a very stable genius at that!” Whether you call this ‘self-confidence’, or just plainly insufferable, it appears that a lot of his followers agree that Trump is, in fact, a political prodigy. In light of his recent…
(Attempting) To Master the Art of Code Switching

Code switching is a phenomenon mostly seen in bilingual and multilingual environments and acts as a bridge between different languages. It’s when people switch between languages mid-conversation, often to fill in the blanks when a word just won’t come to mind in that language, that one word you so desperately wanted to use. The word…
Transforming Languages: What Makes a Successful Translation?

“Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated.” In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom, the Weaver’s head, gets “transformed” into the head of an ass. Back in the Elizabethan Era, the word “translate” had a slightly different meaning in comparison to the modern day. To translate was to transform, to go through the process…
Linguistic Inbreeding: The Downfall Of AI?

Picture this, you are a university student staring down the barrel of impossible deadlines. With each second that passes, the feeling of impending doom seeps into your very existence. In a moment of desperation AI seems to be the only saviour, a lifeline, to spark some creativity. You enter your prompt, breath-bated, just waiting for…
Homeland, Motherland & Fatherland

Across the 195 countries in the world, each one has a different way of referring to itself. For many, the population either views their home as one of two things: the Motherland or the Fatherland—both have different histories, connotations and reasons as to why. However, some countries don’t refer to either; the US is frequently…